The rising cost of health care is of increasing concern to many. One way to reduce the cost of medical treatment is to reduce the number of days that are spent in the hospital as there is a large fundamental cost that is associated with each night spent in a hospital bed. As a result, there has been a continued push towards home centered and/or remote offsite patient treatment and/or convalescence. This increased push for remote patient care presents its own significant challenges for health care providers due to the lack of personal contact that clinicians have with patients that are located at remote sites. While mobile communication systems and telemonitoring have greatly increased the quality of the care provided to patients that are being treated or are recovering at a location remote from the hospital, clinicians have found it useful to augment the care provided via these systems with remote site visits by the clinicians to check up on the patients in person. In-person visits may be particularly necessary where the remotely located patient experiences difficulty in making regularly scheduled visits to a medical care facility, perhaps due to mobility issues that are part of the patient's ailments or perhaps due to a lack of available transportation options or the patient's remote location.
Many types of patient conditions may lead to a situation where it is desirable for a clinician to periodically check up on the patient's condition with a visit to the remote site at which the patient is located. The patient's condition may be that of a chronic disease such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), congestive heart failure (CHF) or another manageable chronic disease such as diabetes. Other times, a patient's physical or mental disability may make periodic remote site checkups by the clinician desirable as well.
It is known in the field that in-person interaction between the clinician and the patient is advantageous to the treatment and/or recovery of the patient from his affliction. These clinician/patient interactions do, however, experience a diminishing rate of return as the interactions substantially increase in number. Therefore, in a system where a relatively smaller number of clinicians must provide care to a relatively larger number of patients, the interest of efficiency requires that clinician visits to remotely located patients must be scheduled in such a way as to maximize the quality of care given to each individual patient while minimizing the amount of time spent with that patient out of the pool of clinician time devoted to the treatment of all patients.
Various devices, systems, and methods have been developed to alleviate some of the above-noted issues regarding patient health care. In particular, U.S. Patent Application No. 2005/0131740 to Massenzio et al. describes a system and method for controlling home health care services. The '740 application discloses a system by which the efficiency of remote care is improved by the transmission of remote patient alarm conditions. Health care providers are able to maximize their efficiency in providing emergency care to multiple remotely located patients by tracking the patient's locations using GPS and triaging the patients based upon the specific emergency conditions. However, this application does not address the scheduling and provision of non-emergency clinician visits or checkups.
U.S. Patent Application No. 2004/0249676 is directed to a system for the automatic scheduling of patients on waiting lists to receive medical treatments such as elective surgery, diagnostic services, clinic services and endoscopies. This system uses a calculated urgency score to calculate the target date for the patient's procedure based upon patient recorded physiological data and a ranked triage of patient procedure need. This system is limited in its application in that it only projects a date or schedule for a specific procedure and is not directed toward the scheduling of recurring clinician checkups or visits. Additionally, this disclosure does not contemplate the use of a wide variety of patient diagnostic data, but rather is limited to the evaluation of patient physiological data.
Therefore, it is desirable in the field of the provision of care to remotely located patients to provide an automated system by which clinician visits to remotely located patients are scheduled in an economical fashion.
Furthermore, it is desirable that the scheduling be based on a wide variety of diagnostic parameters such as clinician-observed or so-called “soft” parameters.
In a further embodiment of the present invention, it is desirable that the management system take into account other related data such as already scheduled clinician visits, patient requests for additional or fewer clinician visits, or remote patient locations with respect to the locations of other remotely located patients.